Saturday, April 25, 2015

New Live ATC Tutorials for Pilots

TL;DR: Live ATC needs dedication and skills; we created tutorials to help pilots get the best experience out of it. Go read them on our new help site.



While iOS users are waiting for the new update to be approved by Apple (anytime this coming week if all goes well), we wanted to give a bit more information about the new Live ATC feature.

With this new update, a group of hand picked users can act as air traffic controllers in order to add another level of realism to Infinite Flight Live. The role of air traffic controller is not easy and requires quite a bit of training to ensure a good experience for everyone. If you want to become an air traffic controller, we recommend that you get involved with the Infinite Flight community: there is no streamlined on-boarding process yet and we only want people who are truly dedicated for such an important role in Infinite Flight Live.

Having experienced ATC personnel is only one part of a great Live ATC experience; we also need to have pilots who know how to properly communicate when flying to and from a towered airport. For this, we took a few steps to hopefully guarantee that everyone will have a good time with this new feature:
  • Live ATC is only enabled on the Advanced Servers. Those servers require pilots to have a minimum amount of XP and standing. Those minimums are usually not hard to reach if you spend a little bit of time flying in the Free Flight servers.
  • An air traffic controller has the power to ghost pilots if they are not properly communicating or following instructions. Being ghosted is not a punishment, it is not personal, it usually only means that you need to go learn a bit more about proper ATC communication.
  • For that, we created a set of simple, focused articles on a new help page to help pilots with ATC communication. Please go read it and don't hesitate to ask questions in the various Infinite Flight community pages.
As always, this is a feature that we will continue improving down the road. Don't hesitate to send us feedback; we are especially interested in getting feedback from real life pilots and air traffic controllers.

Happy landings!